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Stuart W. Shulman

Fear and Loathing on the Social Campaign Trail

What were voters afraid of on the eve of the 2012 election? Fear is one of the most freely expressed forms of sentiment in social media. This "Voice of the Voter" presentation looks social data collected in the final week of October 2012 and speaks to the nature and salience of fear among the electorate. Bridging history, political science, and computational science, Dr. Shulman will present a frightening array of scenarios predicted in the social media updates as the final phase of the campaign transpired.

Dr. Stuart Shulman is a political science professor, software inventor, entrepreneur, and garlic growing enthusiast who coaches U11 boys club soccer for FC Massachusetts with a national D-license. He is the VP for Text Analytics at Vision Critical, founder & CEO of Texifter, LLC, Director of QDAP-UMass, and Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics. Stu is the proud owner of a Bernese/Shepherd named "Colbert" who goes by ''Bert. You can follow his exploits @stuartwshulman or @DiscoverText. Dr. Shulman is the sole inventor of the Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT), a free, open source, Web-based text analysis software project, as well as the Public Comment Analysis toolkit (PCAT), and a new analytic network known as DiscoverText, which was recently acquired by Vision Critical. The QDAP labs at UMass and the University of Pittsburgh are fee-for-service coding labs that work on projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Mental Health (NIMH), the Smithsonian, and other U.S. funding agencies. Dr. Shulman has been the Principal Investigator and Project Director on numerous National Science Foundation-funded research projects focusing on electronic rulemaking, human language technologies, manual annotation, digital citizenship, and service-learning efforts in the United States.